Using the largest three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations to date, collisionless magnetic reconnection in large-scale electron-positron plasmas without a guide field is shown to involve complex interaction of tearing and kink modes. The reconnection onset is patchy and occurs at multiple sites which self-organize to form a single, large diffusion region. The diffusion region tends to elongate in the outflow direction and become unstable to secondary kinking and formation of "plasmoid-rope" structures with finite extent in the current direction. The secondary kink folds the reconnection current layer, while plasmoid ropes at times follow the folding of the current layer. The interplay between these secondary instabilities plays a key role in controlling the time-dependent reconnection rate in large-scale systems.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.125001 | DOI Listing |
Phys Rev E
November 2024
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
Collisionless shocks are ubiquitous in space and astrophysical plasmas, and they are essential dynamical features of these systems. Lacking Coulomb collisions, these shocks are mediated by the anomalous dissipation provided by nonlinear plasma instabilities. By numerically resolving the structure of a steady-state, ion gyroviscous shock, we show that ion gyroviscosity, alone, can produce weak (M≲1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpace Sci Rev
November 2024
University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX USA.
How magnetic reconnection is triggered or suppressed is an important outstanding problem. By considering pinching of a current sheet that has formed at non-equilibrium, we show that the background plasma beta is a major controlling factor in the onset and nature of magnetic reconnection. A high plasma beta inhibits a current sheet from pinching down to kinetic scales required for collisionless reconnection, while a low beta facilitates it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
November 2024
National Institute for Fusion Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Toki 509-5292, Japan.
A key ingredient for realizing a magnetically confined tritium-deuterium plasma fusion reactor is plasma heating by fusion-born high-energy helium ions, as a chained cycle of "nuclear burning." Efficient collisionless plasma heating by high-energy particles is anticipated when their energy is directly transferred to the plasma through waves. Those processes often involve nonlinear structure formations in phase-space, spanned by real-space and velocity-space coordinates, that significantly influence heating efficiency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMon Not R Astron Soc
November 2024
Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2611, Australia.
We introduce Astrophysical Hybrid-Kinetic simulations with the flash code ([Formula: see text]) - a new Hybrid particle-in-cell (PIC) code developed within the framework of the multiphysics code flash. The new code uses a second-order accurate Boris integrator and a predictor-predictor-corrector algorithm for advancing the Hybrid-kinetic equations, using the constraint transport method to ensure that magnetic fields are divergence-free. The code supports various interpolation schemes between the particles and grid cells, with post-interpolation smoothing to reduce finite particle noise.
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